More Solar Power!

Throughout the project, we've usually had one or two people helping us ("inlaws and outlaws"), but we've slowed down a bit and now it's just my wife and I working on the house most days. (plus the dry-wall finisher) My wife has been running the crane, with me on the end of it (talk about excitement!), in order for us to mount more of our solar panels. Since December '06, we had been operating the house site with just 6 panels. Now we have 24 panels on the roof. On a bright day, we receive 5,000 watts of power from these 24 panels!

Of course we don't use much power up there, so our batteries have been staying full. Because we're not connected to the grid, there's nothing to do with the excess power. So as not to feel wasteful, we go around turning ON lights in the house when the sun is shining! (it produces a small amount of free heat which is useful this time of the year) To use our power more effectively, we bought the most energy efficient upright freezer we could find (527Kwhr/yr. for 20.6 cu ft., manual defrost) and moved it into the pantry yesterday. This will let us unplug a not-so-energy-efficient deep freeze that we had connected to the grid elsewhere on the farm.

We haven't moved into the house yet, but some of our frozen food has - that's a milestone. :)